Quotes About Imagination

If instead of just clay I could take all the prettiest things Like a rainbow, Or clouds or the way a bird sings, Maybe then, dearest Mommy, If I put them all together, I could really make a sculpture of you.

why would an eye want to form?

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Complexity is self-generating. The diversity of our world is understandable because it is possible to design imaginary self-consistent worlds potentially as complex as our own.     This is no mere restatement of common sense. Everyone daydreams alternate worlds, but the imagination soon tires of filling in details. Ulam, Von Neumann, and Conway showed that a few recursive rules can paint in all the details. Creation can be simple.

Gus, I know you hit your head, but you should be able to tell a few things about Tara. Like for instance she isn't printed on cheap paper. When she talks, her words don't appear in balloons over her head. And after long and hard study, I can guarantee she exists in at least three dimensions.

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

The brain is evolutionarily hard-wired to do its best daydreaming only when it senses that it is safe to do so—when, in short, it is relaxed. In Kounios's words, "The relaxation phase is crucial.5 That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Or during Sunday afternoon walks on Glasgow Green, when the idea of a separate condenser seems to have excited the aSTG in the skull of James Watt. Eureka indeed.

...though many a gatherer has carried his basket through these diamond districts of the mind...

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

A writer lives at best, in a state of astonishment.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish;A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,A forked mountain, or blue promontoryWith trees upon 't.

My Oberon! what visions have I seen! Methought I was enamor'd of an ass.

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.

All impediments in fancy's courseAre motives of more fancy.

Sits as one new-risen from a dream.

My imaginations are as foulAs Vulcan's stithy.

True, I talk of dreams,Which are the children of an idle brain,Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

William Shakespeare

Tell me where is fancy bred,Or in the heart or in the head?How begot, how nourished?Reply, reply.